By GREGORY ROBERTS, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Friday, February 25, 2005

SHORELINE -- Targeted by a faculty vote of no confidence, Shoreline Community College President Holly Moore said yesterday she intends to reach out to disaffected professors and lead the school through the crisis.

"What we have to do as a campus is some healing," Moore, 57, said. "We have to move forward."

But faculty members indicated she's got a long way to go to pull together an institution still scarred by an ethics scandal involving Moore's predecessor, who departed in 2000.

"There are some people who are convinced if anybody is given enough time, they can make changes," said Tim Payne, an economics and international studies professor who is chairman of the faculty senate. "We just don't know how much time we can give.

"A lot are questioning whether this president has the skill set to be able to make the changes necessary."

The faculty vote is not binding. Only the college's Board of Trustees can fire Moore, and after the faculty vote, the board released a statement saying that the trustees are "united in expressing our complete confidence in Dr. Holly Moore and her leadership."

The senate's no-confidence motion passed 121-26, with nine marked abstentions, in balloting concluded Tuesday, Payne said. Although Moore said 253 faculty members did not participate in the vote, Payne said that 109 of the 156 full-time professors did, and they repudiated Moore's leadership by more than a 2-to-1 ratio.(Editor's Note: The original version of this story underrepresented the ratio.)

The problem with Moore's administration of the 15,000-student college is "a lack of competence, at least, in a variety of areas. It's organization, it's communication, it's the way people are treated," Payne said.

Moore said she would work to smooth what Payne called her "top down" management style.

"We always need to improve on our listening," she said.

The president said she would focus on providing better explanations for administrators' decisions.

And she plans to commission a survey of the campus climate.

"It's a good start to talk about what you need to do differently," Payne said, "but it's more important to actually do it."

It's not a question of Moore's commitment, he said.

"The faculty really knows that she cares about the place, that she is very emotionally attached to it," he said.

The no-confidence vote came more than two months after the senate delivered an eight-page report to Moore and the trustees recounting a range of complaints, including fancier retirement parties for administrators than faculty members, failure to advertise administrative job openings adequately and approval by the trustees last spring of a $25,000 raise for Moore (to $160,000 a year) in a meeting the state auditor said was held in violation of the state sunshine law.

Moore rebutted those complaints: a Columbia Tower Club retirement party for an administrator was paid for by friends and coworkers; the job openings were more like changes in titles for existing positions; the meetings-law violation was inadvertent.

But Payne said the details of the incidents are less important than the broader concerns identified in the report: unfairness, favoritism, a class system lorded over by administrators, poor communication, chaotic governance, low morale, a lack of accountability.

He acknowledged that not all faculty members share those views of Moore and her administration. One who doesn't is accounting professor Dan King.

"I don't have any issues with her performance," King said yesterday.

Moore, he said, has faced major challenges in dealing with a tight budget in difficult financial times.

"She's done her share of shouldering that load and that conflict," King said.

Moore started at the college 28 years ago as a part-time teacher and later moved from the classroom to a series of administrative jobs.

She was vice president for work force and economic development when she was named interim president in 2000, followed by a permanent appointment a year later.

Moore succeeded Gary Oertli, who resigned to take a job with a software company that had won a $350,000 contract from the school a year earlier to develop an online bookstore and course-registration system.

A state ethics board found no evidence of wrongdoing in Oertli's job switch -- but it fined him for manipulating bid documents to favor the company, which had been started by Oertli's friend Paul Mauel.

Naming Moore to her ex-boss' job was a mistake, psychology professor Bob Thompson said yesterday.

"We had an opportunity at that point to clean house and start over -- and it didn't happen," he said.

The situation has deteriorated since, Thompson said.

"We don't feel respected as faculty members," he said. "That's what it boils down to."